Sunday, January 13, 2013

Love-Flings with Startup's

2: The First Step.

When personal life and professional life collide consequences are really dire. The effects on me were really bad loss of motivation, straying away of professional/career goals and change in preferences.

"A promise to keep " had driven me crazy and cornered me in personal life , with change in preferences I took a wrong exit in freeway of life.Kept going with flow of life for a while and paying heed to preferences ,Just a hoping as long as I get a another day I can get a shot to build a career.Towards the end of job with Thomson Reuters I realized that waiting for right time and opportunity won't get me anywhere in life. This thought process was fueled by the meet with Nikhil Jain and his stories plus Indu and his few inspiring words. And Finally decided to take a break from all the job hunting formalities and review "What I want do and not what I should be doing " . This period was kinda tough in all aspects personal loss, Thesis Defense(MS degree) and self review. And Finally efforts put in paid off , got my first break though in a start up , a Embedded and Wireless start-up, Cellular Tracking Technologies(CTT) "my first step" into a bigger picture of professional life .

Initial it took me few days to get into that groove , that mentality of a embedded engineer. Sharpening C skills , reading and comprehending datasheets, refreshing my all electronics basics , making a habit of remembering things and not googling them.

People part of CTT were Mike,Roann,Thomas,Joe,Todd,Cassey. Things were thrown at me by Joe, Mike initially i.e. I was given eval kits and datasheets and specs and get going. My work and daily activities really lacked mentor-ship , my doings where based on my judgement , product timeline , inputs given by Joe.

Later Cassey and Tom tagged along , Tom was a useful resource since he worked on previous gen products helped me to solve tons of issues that a fresh graduate makes.

Learning curve:

Hardware debugging thanks to Joe , learnt a few tricks and concepts

Coding tricks from Tom

First Hand experience playing with Hardware , tools and C Coding.

Taking the product till beta version of product.

Things that lacked.

As fresh Graduate, well can't be a legit excuse but still, lacked little bit of training, mentor-ship , review of tasks done.

Making me design/architect the code as per my knowledge or convenience was sort of bad Idea , with not much experience in embedded C coding or software architecture.

Issue solving took relatively longer time and beta code still had some issues till end.

Somerset as a place was depressing couldn't take after 7-8 months of stay

7-8 months down the line financial constrains took a toll on me and I had to move on.But I am thank full to CTT and regret I couldn't stay little longer and not doing job to my potential due to above things that lacked but If Asked me today (01/12/2012) do the same project, things would be different wrt implementation.

Exit Interview

Work ambiance: was really good , pretty flexible for a start up Pay(individualistic opinion) I found it okie , since i have already worked with a start-up I can understand the financial constrains.

Technology: I did a small amount of market research and I can definitely say the products and technology used are upto to mark with current market trends.

People : (Roann,Thomas , Mike ,Joe,Todd , Cassey ) Thanks to everyone , it was good working with everyone. I appreciate thomas and Joe 's guidance . Roann was good as Administrative Assistant . Mike I really admired your patience dealing with various issues. I have a small suggestion if Cassey can contribute

more into 865 unit as developer , I have heard a lot from Thomas about Cassey "Cassey is really good and talented person" So I think using Cassey as major resource would really nice.

Product Design: Usually a firmware engineer/Embedded Engineer is only responsible for developing drivers or software .prototype building , verification and testing has to be done before a firmware engineer gets into driver seat. In that way you save your development time and can influence deadlines in good way. Maybe because of packed schedules we didn't had enough time to work on software design drivers---> Network layer ---> application layer